Telecom

Orange is a major European telecommunications provider that has been focused on what they call the “porous enterprise” – organizations in which many of the previous boundaries and barriers between businesses and customers are gone. Social media flows in and out of companies and mixes with public collections of discussions about them. Locked down corporate laptops now are joined by employee owned mobile devices. Consumer social media products now mingle with enterprise social media. Corporations now engage directly with customers through public consumer social media services.

For example, Orange has several Twitter accounts. @Orange provides general product information while @Oranger_Conseil and @OrangeHelpers provide customer support for French and English speaking customers, and @orangeapi offers technical information for developers building applications against services offered by Orange. There are several other related accounts.

These are the connections among the Twitter users who follow or are followed by Orange when queried on September 30, 2011, scaled by numbers of followers (with outliers thresholded). Connections created when users follow one another.

The dense follows/follower map is a network that represents potential communication, the links indicate that there is a “follows” relationship between any two people. The network of activated connections created when people reply or mention one another is more sparse. For example, the @Oranger_Conseil and @OrangeHelpers accounts get mentioned by a number of other users who interact with them. The connections among these people creates a network pattern:

This is a map of the connections among the Twitter users who recently tweeted the word Orange conseil OR OrangeHelpers when queried on September 30, 2011, scaled by numbers of followers (with outliers thresholded). Connections created when users reply, mention or follow one another.

It is characterized by a hub and spoke pattern created as customers who have few connections to one another are linked to one of the hub customer service accounts for English and French speakers.

Mentions of these accounts are good indications that the topic is the Orange Telecom company and not the many other Orange entities (like Orange County, the fruit, and the color, among others). Searching for the term “Orange” or even “#Orange will likely bring back a large amount of these “name-space collisions” – overlapping uses of the term “Orange”.

These are the connections among the Twitter users who recently tweeted the word #Orange when queried on October 3, 2011, scaled by numbers of followers (with outliers thresholded). Connections created when users reply, mention or follow one another.

This network of connections among the population of people who tweeted the term “#Orange has many “isolates” – users who do not follow, reply or mention any other person in the network. These people all tweeted “#Orange” but they lack any connection to anyone else who did so.

The large cluster of connected users is a group of people discussing the Orange Telecom company, while the other clusters involve people discussing the colors of Autumn (Pumpkins!).